By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2   

There has been a heated debate over the past couple of weeks on the question of who can and who cannot call themselves "doctor." The dispute is not about the traditional use of the title of "doctor" for a medical M.D. Rather it is about the Ph.D. and if a Ph.D. can, or should, call themselves "doctors".

The controversy began when several distinguished American researchers with Ph.D.'s from universities such as Cornell, Texas and CalTech, and who had been recruited by the prestigious Max Planck Institute in Germany, were criminally charged at the behest of the ministry of education of the state of Thuringia with using the title of "doctor" to which under German law they were not entitled. Conviction could lead to a year in jail. A 1939 Nazi-era law restricts the use of the title "doctor" to Germans exclusively. The law had been updated in 2001 in order to extend the privilege of being a "doctor" in Germany to EU citizens; but not to Americans, or Brazilians or Japanese, for that matter, whose Ph.D.'s continue unrecognized in Germany.

These are very sensitive matters for academics when it comes to admission to a university job. The escalation in the use of the title of "doctor", however, is a fairly recent phenomenon in the United States. American academics rarely called themselves "doctors" when I arrived in the U.S. in the mid 1960s as a graduate student. At Princeton the usage was frowned upon, and professors were addressed as "Mr." not "Dr." (there were of course at the time very few professors who were "Ms." but that is another story).

Today, the title of "doctor" is more widely used in the U.S. It was German-born "Dr." Kissinger who set this tone, followed by "Dr." Albright and now "Dr." Rice. All these Secretaries of State had of course also been a "Professor" in their previous lives; but the title "Professor" does not read well with an American public distrustful of university-based intellectuals. "Doctor" has a better resonance.

The Max Planck affaire does, however, open an interesting recourse for human rights advocates who have long been seeking ways to bring Henry Kissinger to account. Next time he returns to Germany, the state of Thuringia can bring criminal charges against him for his long term temerity in using his Harvard Ph.D. to justify his title of "doctor".

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper.